Go Beyond MLS » Google

Make Your Google Local Listing “Stand Out” For $25 Per Month

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:00:16 +0000

It was not the question of “if” but rather “when” would Google finally monetize on their “free” service called Googe Places (aka “Google Local Ads” and “Google Local Business Center”). If you have not logged into your account today, there is a surprise waiting for you. Google is offering you to “yellow tag” some features on your listing for a flat $25 per month fee. Depending on your choice, a yellow tag will appear in your listing, which should encourage internet users visit your website, browse your business’ photos and videos or read the “Google place posts“:

I was trying to find, without any success, a business using this new “advertising” opportunity with Google. Maybe because it is new.

Should you jump on using this new “yellow tagging” advertising? It all depends. If your listing is already getting good results, above described yellow tag can draw more eye-balls to your listing. The good news is that you can give it a try for one month to see how well will it work for your business.

Have you seen these “yellow tags” around yet?

UPDATE, June 25, 2010: Apparently Google has been rolling out tags from city to city since April 20, 2010. I understand, however, that at this time not every one has this option in their Google Places Accout… yet.Similar Posts:

More Nofollow Tags On Twitter: Is This Beginning Of The End For Twitter?

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:14:16 +0000

UPDATE, March 2, 2010: After experimenting with a plugin for Google Buzz, I have decided not to use on at this time. All available plugins as of now offer to ad comments to Google Reader items- this potentially can scatter the discussion all over places. Hopefully a better solution will be implemented soon.

With the arrival of Google Buzz, I began to question whether or not I should continue to concentrate on Twitter. I hope I am not the only one. Two days ago Twitter decided to intruduce even more “nofollow” attributes this time to their internal linking structure. I understood (but did not agree) when they introduced the first round of nofollow attributes to their links, I guess as young startup you needed to do what you needed to do.

So today I have replaced the Tweetmeme button (courtesy of Tweetmeme ) with new and shiny Google Buzz button (courtesy of Hameedullah Khan). The Tweetmeme button was moved to the button of each post. This is just a symbolic gesture of my personal dissatisfaction of the way Twitter is “innovating”, I have nothing but love for Tweetmeme.

Twitter has bigger issues to deal with….

For Twitter trying to manipulating the flow of the Google juice at this stage of the game is really childish, and if that is the reason for the latest change I just feel sorry for Twitter. Really guys, is this the best you’ve got? Now if the recent change was made as a further attempt to eliminate spam my question is the same, is this the best you’ve got? There are ways to eliminate spam without punishing your users.

There is also another factor, and I maybe completely wrong about it… I appears to me that many of my online are starving for a more meaningful way to keep the conversation going (which in my opinion is impossible to have on Twitter). So if you compare Twitter and Google Buzz from that perspective, Google Buzz wins hands down, and if you thought Google Buzz is no threat to Twitter you should really think again.

Now back to the new and shiny Google Buzz button- you need to use your GMail/Google Reader to interact with it. You can also follow Go Beyond MLS on Google.Similar Posts:

More Spam From LeapFish???

Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:00:45 +0000

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

UPDATE Feb. 5, 2010: It appears LeapFish is no longer showing the link in the footer of their website to their “directory” I wrote about bellow:

This change must have been implemented today as Bing.com’s cached page of LeapFish from yesterday February 4, 2010 still has the link:

LeapFish has also implemented robots.txt file on their website disallowing web crawlers from indexing the directory:

Few days ago I tried to to get attention of Google’s Anti-Spam Czar – Matt Cutts via his FriendFeed account. I wanted Matt to comment about LeapFish’s latest directory- but I realize, it may not be Google’s practice to comment on these sort of things publicly. That or you need to be Michael Gray, Aaron Wall or Andy Beard to get some one like Matt Cutts to listen to you.

So what is my latest beef with LeapFish? Their spammy directory located at http://www.leapfish.com/dr/ – my apologies for not providing a live link, I consider LeapFish to be an unsafe website. It also appears by my estimates that Google is indexing this new directory at the rate of about 50 pages a day- there are about 200 pages in Google’s index from this “directory” as of this writing.

So I invite those who are still with me to explore some of the pages from the above mentioned directory. One of the first pages from the directory that jump at me was “Shopping”:

Clicking through to the page on LeapFish.com you are given opportunity to “narrow” your search- so I decide to narrow mine to “Death Care”:

What do you know?!!! Now you can narrow your search geographically- naturally I selected New Jersey the state I live in:

How about that?!! LeapFish knows all the counties in the state of New Jersey- naturally my next selection would be the county I live in:

How about that?!!! Turns out LeapFish is so intuitive it knows about every city in my state- so just for the heck of it I decided to check and see what kind of death care shopping I can do in Jackson, NJ:

And the relevancy of my final destination in LeapFish directory? Google search results associated with the death of Michael Jackson?

What can I say? I am extremely disappointed. I am sure few results of local funeral directors or even a local WalMart with the line of their latest caskets would not be as disappointing. Since LeapFish is using some APIs from Google, they could have really impress me by showing me a few relevant products using Google Base API.

So yeah, I am desperate for the attention from Matt Cutts. Matt could you please explain to me how this sort of “directories” improve the State of The Index? In my opinion the LeapFish Directory does just the opposite- LeapFish pollute the Internet.

If you are interested to find out more about LeapFish I highly recommend LeapFish Review by Better Business Bureau.Similar Posts:

Should I Cross-link My Websites?

Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:55:03 +0000

This is something many web-masters struggle with. You create a new website that is going to knock every one socks off, but now you need Google and other search engines to notice it. The quickest way is to slap a few links on other websites you have that may already rank well and are well indexed by the search engines. But is it good idea? As Matt Cutts of Google explains in the video bellow, it all depends. If you have few minutes it is well worth watching:

Similar Posts:

Google Local Ads: Post to Your Place Page

Vlad Zablotskyy — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:14:45 +0000

If you are using Google Local Business Center, you may have already noticed a new feature which allows you to post messages (limited to 160 characters) to you place page:

Each message will expire in 30 days from the time it is published. If you decide to include a specific link inside the message, it will be converted into an HTML (click-able) link on your listing page see example bellow of first message from The Chocolate Belles:

You can see Chocolate Belles live listing here.

This new feature offers you an additional options to promote specific events, services or products via Google Local Business Center.

According to Post to Your Place Page FAQ – you can only have one message at a time posted to your place page.

Disclosure: I currently advise The Chocolate Belles on Internet marketing.Similar Posts:

Google Is Testing New Ad Formats

Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:40:42 +0000

Yesterday, Google announced that they are testing new ad formats that among other things will include video. This is how they explained:

Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information. For example, if you want to learn a magic trick, a video showing you how to perform the trick is likely the best result. So over the past few years, we’ve blended videos, images, maps and more into the search results on Google.com.

While I have seen many Google video ads on different websites and blog I have yet to see one of these ads in the search results. But according to Official Google Blog US residents have seen these ads:

AdWords advertisers had an option to create video ad for quiet some times. It would be however difficult for real estate agents to benefit from these video ads in the search results because the longest ad that you can create for your AdWords campaign cannot exceed 120 seconds. Hardly enough time to make a quick video tour of your listing! I am sure however that many creative and innovative real estate agents can use these video ads to promote their real estate business.Similar Posts:

New and Sexy LeapFish: But Framesets Can Present Issues.

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:37:11 +0000

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

Update Nov. 9, 2009: It appears that LeapFish is no longer using framesets on their website.

A mention by US Today, stream of hundreds of Tweets , mentioned by hundreds of blogs, a “cutting edge” video on youtube- LeapFish.com relaunch can certainly be seen as enormous success, except…

The leading technology blogs continue to give LeapFish.com nothing short of a “cold shoulder”.

All the buzz surrounding the relaunch is focused on how sexy and nice looking the new website is, no one seems to be trying to “flip beyond the cover page”.

I would like to write about LeapFish’s implementation of framesets on their pages that may actually spook an unseasoned Internet user into believing that they are visiting unsecured websites.

If you search LeapFish for “Read Write Web” for example, the website returns nice clean results with the most relevant link in number one position:

Considering the average user expectation, most of us would expect to land on http://www.readwriteweb.com/ – it is however not the case with LeapFish. After clicking the the link you end up on a nice lookng LeapFish page which embeds (via frameset) the content from The Read Write Web and the LeapFish bar at the bottom of the page:

Click on the above image to view it in full size

While visitors to The Read Write Web may not care at all. Visitors to websites like Amazon can get confused and and may be led to believe that shopping on Amazon and other websites are no longer secure. Let me show you an example of what I mean. The following shot is of my Amazon account page while accessing the website directly (typing http://www.amazon.com into my browser):

Click on the above image to view it in full size

The HTTPS as well as the lock icon are the basic signs by which an average internet can identify whether or not website is secure.

Now the screenshot of the same page but via frameset on LeapFish.com:

Click on the above image to view it in full size

Both HTTPS and lock icons are missing. And the URL clearly says you are still on LeapFish.com. Even though I consider myself an above average Internet user, before I logged into my Amazon account via the frameset on LeapFish I had to check the code of the page first:

I wanted to know if my Amazon login info is safe with LeapFish. How many users do you think will do that?

Potential Issues With Google?

AdSense users can tell you how tough Google is when it comes to enforcing terms and condition and how easy it is to get banned. Google Search API TOS do not address the use framesets- so if you know if use of framesets allowed please enlighten me:

Click on the above image to view it in full size

If you are interested to find out more about LeapFish I highly recommend LeapFish Review by Better Business Bureau.Similar Posts:

Telling Google How Often To Crawl Your Site- Not A Good Idea After All.

Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:58:54 +0000

A while back I wrote an article pointing out one of the features available to webmasters at Google Webmaster Central – ability to set a custom crawl rate. At the time I thought it was an outstanding idea. It is still is a good solution should googlebot visit your site too often causing issues with bandwidth (even though I have never heard of such scenario).

Webmasters however should exercise caution when increasing the crawl rate via Google Webmaster Central. A few weeks ago I was involved in an upgrade of a website with 2000+ pages. One of the side effects of the upgrade was that we ended up with 2000+ new urls. Unfortunately there was no easy way to implement 2000+ redirects on the website. But, since most of the traffic came from PPC campaigns, we decided to let Google re-index the website on it’s own. Exception was of course that we used Google Webmaster Central to implement request for a more frequent crawl by Google. We increased the crawl rate by some 3000% only to receive the following notice a few days later:

Dear Webmaster,

Google has algorithms that determine how much to crawl each site. Our goal is to crawl as many page from your site, http://www.xxxxx.com/, as we can without overwhelming your server’s bandwidth.

For your site, http://www.xxxxx.com/, you have set a very low crawl rate which is preventing us from accessing your great content. We recommend you set the crawl rate option to “Let Google determine my default”, or, if you prefer to maintain a custom setting, increasing the rate.

Thanks,

The Google Web Crawling Team

In fact the Google had not indexed a single URL from the new sitemap. Not even the home page (which is/was the strongest page of the website) was re-indexed. So we followed Google’s instruction and within 24 hours our new pages began to appear in the index.

So if you are thinking of increasing the crawl rate in Google Webmaster Central – exercise caution or you may run the risk of not increasing the the crawl rate enough for Google to do it’s job. Similar Posts:

Google Local Business Center Now Offers Reports and Statistics

Vlad Zablotskyy — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:18:41 +0000

I have always been a huge fan of Google Local Business Center- a free way to drive foot traffic to your business. When you list your business with Google Local Business Center, you business is likely to show up alongside a Google map for certain search terms. Let say you need to find a dentist in Jackson, NJ- all the listings along the map are result of dentist offices taking advantage of Google Local Business center. I have written in the past how a friend of mind noticed increase of visitors to her shop after we listed her business in Google Local Business Center.
I also wanted to see more statistics and reporting inside the Business Center account. My wishes have finally came ture. It appears that Google is now providing some insightful statistics for your business’ local ads and coupons associated with your listing. Just go to your account and you should see a link to your report as shown in the image to your right.

The port shows the graph of impressions and actions associated with your business:

The actions are divided into three categories: clicks to your website, clicks to get driving directions and clicks to get more info on Google Maps:

It shows you top 10 queries that trigger an impression when an internet user is looking for terms associated with your business:

And it also provides the list of top 10 Zip codes associated with the requests for driving directions:

At this point I am not sure what statistics are available for coupons- as I do not have any active coupons running at this time. However if you do and are able to write a short post, with some snapshots of reporting for coupons, please come back and live a link to your post or article.

If you are a business owner and are looking to drive “foot traffic” to you store or business location you should definitely look into taking advantage of Google Local Business Ads- it is absolutely free!Similar Posts:

AdWords Introduces Ad Auctions

Vlad Zablotskyy — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:34:32 +0000

When I read the headline this morning for the first time on AdWords Blog, I thought to myself – “This cannot be good!”. Auction means bidding against your competitors, and when the bidding wars will get out of hand, the end user will suffer.

Well, Google found the way around it by keeping the ad quality in the auctions. Watch the video for yourself and let me know what do you think. It makes a lot of sense to me.

Similar Posts:

Google May Harm Your Computer

Vlad Zablotskyy — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 14:52:45 +0000

If you knew me better, you will probably realize that such a headline was quiet impossible. As far as harming my computer I consider Google to be the safest websites out there. However this morning (way ahead of April 1st) Google is showing that all website mays harm your computer, including www.google.com. If you notice a decline in today’s traffic you now know why. I think it’s funny, and they should repeat it on April 1st.Similar Posts:

Have You Listed Your Business With Google Local Business Center? You Should! It is FREE!

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:09:59 +0000

It is quiet surprising how very few business owners who operate both a website as well as provide services from a physical location do not take advantage of Google Local Business Center. This service can give your business (and your website) extra exposure for free.

Background story… I have been helping a dear friend of mine, who owns a candy supply store in Brick, NJ, with her website. Most of her revenue comes from clients who visit her store to purchase candy making supplies, order cakes for special occasions or attend her decorating classes. Keeping that in mind, after setting her up with a WordPress powered website (which I barely touched since! Excellent Job Ann!), I have immediately registered her business with Google Local Business Center. I hope that after reading this post, you will do the same for your business because…

You Can Get More “Spotlight” In Search Results.

Often, as it is with Ann’s business, Internet users will search by adding a “geo-qualifier” (yes I made that word up) to their search term. For example, often times Google users will search for “candy supply store Brick NJ“. And here is the snapshot of the search results they get from Google:

Not only Inter user is presented with a relevant result, as well as with a quick access to driving directions to your business, operating hours and reviews.

If you list your business in correct categories you have a very good chance to drive “laser targeted” traffic (both foot and Internet) to your business.

You can also enhance your local ad with pictures and/or YouTube videos and offer discount coupons for the services you provide.

When you think about array of meta search engines, none of them are capable to produce such results. At least none that I am aware off.

If you have used Google Local Business ads in the past for your business I would love to hear your experience and/or success story.Similar Posts:

Telling Google How Often To Crawl Your Website

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 05:39:33 +0000

If you are using Google Webmaster Tools you are probably aware that, among many things that these tools offer, there is the ability to submit your web site’s sitemap to help Google discover pages on your website. Google Webmasters Tools can also provide some insightful information about your website. Among many different statistics you will see the page containing information about about “crawl statistics”. You will find there a graphic of Googlebot’s activity on your website over the period of last 90 days. Just like the one you see below.

In the past Google did not offer webmasters many options or saying about how ofter they can or will crawl your website. While from time to time, after determining that your website may use a faster crawl rate, they would offer you an option to change this rate. However over the period last few months I was never offered that option in Google Webmaster Tools for my websites. So I have trusted Google, as most of us do, to crawl and discover the websites in their own time, and have completely forgotten about the “crawl rate” settings.

It appears, however, that recently, Google Webmaster Tools have opened the option to set a custom crawl rate for the websites you have listed in your account:

The above option can be found under the main settings in your Google Webmaster Tools account, and it is quiet self-explanatory. Stetting a “slower crawl rate” will reduce Googlebot’s visits to your website. I would recommend not to set a rate slower of what Google is already doing, unless your are experiencing issues with bandwidth. The slower crawl rate will probably result in delay with indexing your latest content. If anything, you may want to experiment with a “faster rate”, if you think it takes too long for your latest content to appear in Google’s index.

For time being I will not customize the crawl rate for this website, as I am pleased with what Google is doing now. I will however experiment with few other websites with intention to report here how can you benefit for this option, if you can benefit at all.Similar Posts: